The power of USB backups on the SRX110

The SRX110 device that I have been labbing with has come with two USB slots. One is designed to be a 3g/4g wan module which would allow a failover internet connection and could server as a remote access gateway. I thought I might leverage the other slot as a USB storage device. I want to keep copies of the configuration locally incase remote/upstream/HQ access is lost and a remote site cannot be accessed for a period.

Junos runs on the FreeBSD kernel. It can be interacted with in the shell. We will need to do this to order to mount and access our usb stick. There is no auto complete in shell. Just need to learn and know these configurations.

When you plug your device in you will gain information included the device’s location and mount point.

Lets confirm some configs and see how they come up in the display set.

set system archival configuration transfer-on-commit
set system archival configuration archive-sites /mnt/Scheduled_backup
set system archival configuration archive-sites /mnt/Commit_backup

Where did some of our configuration go? Well after re typing the configuration a few times and wondering why I couldn’t get the both to run. It seems that it is either one or the other. The appended archive-site command actually breaks off and define two locations. The last configured back up type whilst the first appearing archive-site in the display configuration is used. Now to confirm what is in the flash?

Would you believe it. All my commits are saving to the first archive site defined in the configuration. Odd stuff. So it seems that you can have only one or the other. All those commit configuration archives are in the Scheduled folder. Oh dear.

Due the branch posture of the SRX110 I do not think it is paramount to have USB storage but it is nice to have. The idea of having configurations on regular back up is good. You could even have a spare JUNOS image there in case of any issues. If your infrastructure has a centralised component and this device is deployed to a tele-worker then an internal server may be better at handling configs. You would think you could configure both and have per commit and scheduled configuration backups occurring. Odd Juniper. If anyone knows the reason why or the way around this please comment below. Thanks for reading.

*dumb question*… why do we have all those listings as backups? I believed the ‘interval’ timer for scheduling backups is in minutes. So, I have followed the procedure and within less than 10 min, one commit, but the fille shows so many backup files (just like yours). Where do they all come from?

I expected to see, maybe just one backup file, or several, depending on time elapsed and number of commits done…